Looking at him with a garden hose is kind of disconcerting because you're never really sure where the stream of water stops and Gary starts.
"Yeuh," he said. "Your lady friend's come by."
I sighed. "You let her in?"
A ripple went across his mouth. Maybe it was a smile. Gary's a sucker for the sweettalking ladies.
"You old dog," I said. "What'd she promise you this time?"
Another ripple. "Yeuh. Should make her a key, I reckon."
I walked around to the right side of the house. The yard was crunchy with pecans and mesquite bean pods and red bougainvillea petals, the closest we get to fall colours in South Texas.
Ninety Queen Anne was a decaying twostory craftsman in a state of major denial. It had a dignified facade, intricate woodwork around the windows, a huge bougainvilleadraped front porch where you could sit out of an evening and sip your margarita. But the white paint had started to peel a long time ago, and the green shingled roof sagged in the middle. Sometime in the 1950s the whole house had shifted on its foundations so the right half drooped slightly backward. My mother said it looked paralyzed. I preferred to think of it as extremely relaxed.
When I got to the porch of my inlaw apartment Carolaine Smith was standing in the doorway, letting the air conditioning escape. She was holding the telephone toward me.
Carolaine had on her anchorperson costume—a white silk blouse and conservative blue skirt and blazer, her dark blond hair done up big, brushed away from her face, her makeup heavy for the cameras. Only her prescription glasses were out of costume.
They were large black mousy jobs left over from her days as a smalltime reporter, back when she still called herself Carolyn. She only wore the glasses now when she wanted to see.
"So who's Annie at First Texan?" she asked. "She sounds cute."
"No comment."
"Asshole."
Carolaine handed me the receiver.
Annie at First Texan had pretty much the same question about Carolaine, but she finally agreed to give me the information I'd asked her for last Friday about Julie Kearnes.
Carolaine went into the kitchen, where it smelled like something was burning. I stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. My laundry had been put away for me. The futon was put back into couch position. The swords were off the coffee table and back in the wall rack. Robert Johnson had climbed to the top of the closet and was hiding between two shoe boxes.
He peered out at me hopefully.
I shook my head to tell him that Carolaine was still here.
He made a low growl and disappeared back into the shadows.
Annie started telling me about Julie Kearnes' checking account. Biweekly direct deposits from something called Paintbrush Enterprises—$250 each, steady for the last two months, which was as far back as Annie had pulled the files. A few sporadic pay checks from a temp employment firm in Austin. All other deposits in cash, probably gig money, none of them large amounts. Three overdrafts at H.E.B. Central Market. The usual monthly bills. Julie's balance at the moment was $42.33. About forty dollars more than mine.
Annie told me I owed her bigtime for risking her job.
"Like Garth Brooks," she suggested. "And dinner at La Margarita."
I said it would be fine with me if she had dinner with Garth at La Margarita. I wouldn't stand in the way. Annie called me some unflattering names and hung up.
Carolaine pulled a cookie sheet out of the oven and said, "Damn."
I think the things on the sheet had been chilaquiles in a former life. Strips of corn tortilla and bacon were curled up and smoking. The cheese was brown and the jalapenos were gray. It smelled pretty bad.
"Tinfoil on the top," I suggested. "And turn it down to three hundred degrees next time.
That old Wedge wood's like a nuclear reactor in there."
"Damn it," Carolaine said, pushing up her glasses. "I've got to be back at the studio for the noon broadcast."
"Rowww," Robert Johnson complained from the closet.
I looked down at the burned food, then at my clean living room. "You shouldn't have done all this."
"No big deal."
"No," I said. "I mean you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't keep getting Gary to let you in and setting up house. You don't clean your own apartment this much. It makes me nervous."
She leaned back against the sink and raised her eyebrows. "You're welcome."
I stared out the kitchen window at the crepe myrtle.
Carolaine dropped her hands on her thighs. "Jesus, Tres, what am I supposed to do?
I've hardly seen you this month. You cancel dinner dates on me three times in a row, you leave me waiting outside the Majestic for an hour with two goddamn concert tickets, then I try to do something nice for you—"
"I'm sorry. It's been a hard morning, Carolaine."
Sarcastic smile. "I bet. Still following some woman around Austin. Peeping through her windows with binoculars at night. Poor guy."
"She was murdered."
The smile flickered around the edges, then disappeared.
She listened while I told her the story. She kept her expression soft and sympathetic, but her eyes weren't totally focused on me. They were moving slightly back and forth like they were reading math equations, maybe calculating what the murder meant for my job prospects.
When I was done Carolaine folded her arms. "What did Erainya say?"
"That I was handling it wrong anyway. End of case."
"What did you say?"
"I quit."
After a moment of stunned silence Carolaine looked at her watch. Then she took her purse off the counter and rummaged for something inside. She was trying not to let it show, but I could see the relief loosening up her shoulder muscles.
"So what now?" she asked.
"I don't know. It depends on what Milo Chavez wants."
"You mean you might keep working for him, unlicensed—like the work you did before?"
She said before like it was a euphemism for something one didn't talk about in polite company.
"Maybe," I admitted.
"The last time you did this man a favour it almost got you killed, yes?"
"Yes."
"I don't understand—I don't see why you can't just..."
She stopped herself. The corners of her mouth tightened.
"Say it," I told her. "Why can't I just use my degree and get a real job teaching English somewhere."
She shook her head. "It's not my business, is it?"
"Carolaine—"
"I have to leave, Tres." Then she added without much optimism, "You could come back to the studio with me. We could get takeout, spend the afternoon in my dressing room like old times. It might do us some good."
"I have to call Milo."
The frost set in. "All right."
Carolaine closed her purse, then came up and kissed me very lightly without ever really looking at me. She smelled like baby powder. There were a few freckles on her nose that the makeup hadn't quite covered.
"Sorry I bothered you," she said.
The front door slammed behind her.
Robert Johnson came out of the closet as soon as he heard Carolaine's car start. He looked out the window suspiciously, then gave me a look of death he must've learned from Erainya Manos.
"You want to play Anne Frank when people come over," I said, "don't blame me."
He came over and bit me on the ankle, lazily, then headed for the food dish.
Some days everybody wants to be your friend.
5
At sunset the sky turned the colour of cooked eggplant. Seven million grackles descended for a convention in the trees and phone wires above the city. They sat there making a scratchy highpitched sound that was probably screwing up the sonar of every submarine in the Gulf of Mexico.